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War and the City: Of Arms and the Pen

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

This is the final installment in a five-part series, “War and the City,” by the Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton, chronicling his path from youth to soldier to civilian writer in New York City. To read from the beginning, go to the first installment, “March Song.”

It’s been a long four years, writing, thinking, reading, trying to understand the connection between thought and deed, who I was and who I became and why we use certain words for things. I’ve struggled with the ideas of innocence and experience, trauma and revelation, fiction and truth. I’m still not sure how to remember my war. I’m unsure about a lot of things.

Roy ScrantonOn patrol in al-Dora, Baghdad, spring 2004.

My gravest doubt, to echo the soldier and philosopher J. Glenn Gray, is whether I’ve learned anything from my war at all. In the end, my adrenaline-drenched days driving through Baghdad, my moments of terror and hell-bent fury and my chilling scrapes with death were just more mere human existence, a dazzled bath of glandular chemicals, nothing sublime.
I got my war stories, but I didn’t find any authentic bedrock I could stand on and say this is real. I found no soldier’s faith, no concrete names of villages. How we understand and account for violence, death and destruction seems just as contingent and convention-ridden as any other aspect of human culture and the notion that there’s another “really real reality” somehow reachable beyond the physical, mental and cultural constructs shaping our being in the world seems wholly naïve. We find in war what we want to, what we expect and what we’ve been trained to see.

What’s troubling, though, is that I’ve continued to want to believe, however tenuously, that I’ve had some sort of revelatory and existential encounter with “truth.” I must have learned something profound, some steely-hearted Hobbesian revelation about the “way things really are,” some peek into the heart of darkness, or at least something important about myself — right? Maybe, I tell myself, I just haven’t figured it out yet. And how do I explain my disappointment in having to wonder whether or not I’ve had a revelation?

Equally troubling, I’ve found the moral authority imputed to me as a veteran gratifying and am reluctant to give it up, even though it depends on this very idea of an encounter with truth I don’t wholly believe in. I like how it sets me apart, how people assume I know something they don’t, how my war has made me special. Over time, I’ve gotten used to dropping Iraq into conversation like bait, and while this is certainly an improvement over the nervous, angry silence I lived in before, if I’d seen then the way I use it now I would have been appalled at my easy cynicism.

Just a few years ago, I wanted to shout in people’s faces. Now I walk down Sixth Avenue carrying my dirty little war like a card I hand over for credit.

Just a few years ago, I wanted to shout in people’s faces. Now I walk down Sixth Avenue carrying my dirty little war like a card I hand over for credit. It doesn’t buy anything on its own, but it does change the calculus: the Post Office gives veterans 10 free points on their civil service exam; being a vet, having been to Iraq, gives me similar points in all kinds of ways, from publishing articles to sleeping with women. It might have even helped me get into graduate school.

And what’s wrong with that? It’s what I went for. I’d joined the Army so I could write with authority not just about war but about history, love, life, meaning and truth. George Orwell, Sam Fuller, Norman Mailer—these are the men I followed, men who went to battle in some sense already wanting to be writers. The tradition goes back to Hemingway at least — Hemingway the self-aggrandizing con artist who spent all of six weeks at the front, as a nurse no less, before getting himself blown up. He didn’t even carry a rifle. I was in Iraq for 13 months and had a grenade launcher—why shouldn’t I own that moral authority? Or at least if I think it’s a question, step up and put it on the line.

So here it is on the line.

I had an easy deployment. I didn’t kill anybody. I never even fired my weapon in combat. I mostly drove around Baghdad. I saw nasty things and met some nasty people. I got shot at. I twisted my ankle. Some of my fellow soldiers didn’t come back in one piece and some didn’t come back at all. I remember the U.N. building’s wreckage after it got car-bombed, Humvees burning on Route Irish, the sound of incoming mortar rounds, blood, smoke and fear.

I remember hating the Iraqis. Hadjis, we called them and it took me a few years to train myself out of using the word. I remember learning to despise weakness, incompetence and stupidity — not least because they could get me killed — and learning to enjoy pain and inflicting it on others, not least because it could help me stay alive. I remember the posturing and machismo of military culture and how I was so frightened of being deemed not manly enough, not brave enough, not tough enough, that I hid my love for poetry, my checkered hippie past and much else besides.

I saw the dirty work of empire up close, did it with my own two hands and learned its moral cost.

I remember being disturbed, coming back from Iraq on leave through Dallas-Fort Worth, by all the people thanking me for my service. I remember dusty bodies in Baghdad streets. I remember standing with pride when I got pinned sergeant. I remember the day I got out and left Fort Sill, feeling so light, free and full of hope, yet stricken with an unexpected and deeply unwelcome sense of loss. I remember the faces of friends I’ll never see again.

Mostly I was lucky. I got everything I wanted: I got my college money; I got my teeth fixed; I saw the dirty work of empire up close, did it with my own two hands and learned its moral cost; I felt the ultimate exhilaration Winston Churchill spoke of, that of being shot at and missed; I saw the chaos of war and wrote a novel about it.

I proved to myself I was man enough, whatever that means. The last time I saw my dad was at my sister’s wedding in October, 2006. He tried to talk to me and I cut him down. As if seeing him for the first time, I understood in a flash what kind of man he would have been in the service: a braggart, competent but lazy, noisy, untrustworthy, a moral coward. The roles we’d played in my childhood were now reversed: instead of me not meeting his standard of what a man was, now he failed to meet mine.

Since then, I’ve continued to struggle with what things mean, what a man is or what is truth, but with a difference. My struggle now is no longer merely in my soul but in the world. Rather than treading water in a metaphysical sea, my feet are planted on the simple, quotidian earth. With this body comes mortality, an end and eventual rot, but also the concreteness of human being, our animal life and breathing thoughts.

Roy ScrantonChildren in Baghdad, 2004.

I’ve also realized I’m not alone. I’ve found the other vets I was looking for and my “circle of like-minded souls” together in the same veterans writing group. We hang out a couple hours every Saturday, write from exercises and joke about how messed-up we are. It’s a chance to work on our prose and talk about metaphor, but mostly it’s a place where we can be ourselves. We can show our scars and not look like freaks. We can vent our rage within four safe walls. We can feel guilt, shame and remorse, and not have to be martyrs. The New York University Veterans Writing Workshop, and the men and women in it, have been more important than anything for me in learning how to carry my war.

In the last four years, since getting out of the Army, I’ve earned a B.A. and an M.A. at the New School on the G.I. Bill, and in the fall I start a doctorate at Princeton. I’m no longer angry, so long as I don’t pay too close attention to the continuing military and political disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’m no longer bitter like I was. I’ve come to love New York City. I’ve finished my novel and have it out to agents. I spent this last Fourth of July in the Hamptons with some of my vet-writer friends. I’m awed and humbled by the privilege and good fortune I’ve enjoyed while so many in the world continue to suffer. I look back on my life and see a path along a precipice, marked by countless moments where by some miracle I failed to misstep, some gust of wind failed to dislodge me, or some friendly hand helped me along.

If I brought home anything from the war, it was this: our lives are brief, fragile, and fleeting. We must live together, for we die alone, and sooner than we think. We have no time to waste.

Roy Scranton served in the U.S. Army from 2002 to 2006, and deployed to Iraq with the 1st Armored Division from 2003 to 2004. He recently finished an M.A. in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research and is beginning doctoral study in English at Princeton University. His work has been published in New Letters, Theory & Event, LIT, and elsewhere.

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Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. The project originated in 2007 with a series of personal accounts from five veterans of the Iraq war on their return to American life. It now includes dispatches from veterans of wars past and present.